All students who are new to the Hood Graduate School for the Fall 2014 semester are invited to an orientation on Wednesday, August 20, 5:30-7:30 p.m. The informal welcome reception, to be held at Whitaker Campus Center, will provide an opportunity to meet faculty, staff and fellow students.

The agenda includes a campus tour, introduction to the bookstore and Apple computer lab, a welcome from Graduate School Dean Dr. Maria Green Cowles, and dinner with the program directors. Get the complete agenda and then RSVP here.

Emilie Amt, Professor of History, Chair and the Hildegarde Pilgram Professor of History

This spring, Emilie Amt, Hildegarde Pilgram professor of history at Hood, published two books. The first is a collection of translated medieval texts entitled The Crusades: A Reader, Second Edition. The sourcebook explores the Crusades from medieval perspectives. It includes original European and Middle Eastern documents written by Muslims, Jews and Christians, and covers multiple facets of the period. Emilie’s co-editor, S.J. Allen, taught at Hood in the early 21st century and directed the M.A. in Humanities program for a year. She now teaches at England’s Open University.

The second publication, The Latin Cartulary of Godstow Abbey, is a compilation of more than 900 documents and records from that convent, written mostly in Latin. The book is the result of 10 years of research conducted by Emilie and provides insights into medieval nuns’ lives. Working extensively with the Latin texts, Scott Mauer (M.A. ’14) helped index the book while he was a Humanities graduate student at Hood.

As an immigrant from Ireland herself, Hood grad student Janet Kalinowski found the lives of early Irish women immigrants fascinating—so fascinating that she wanted to make their stories the subject of her Humanities thesis.

“It couldn’t be pigeon-holed as history, and it was very broad at the beginning,” said Ms. Kalinowski. “But the faculty was very enthusiastic. They helped me find a focus and encouraged a cross-disciplinary approach with both the history and English departments.”

The result was Hope on this Side of the Grave: Irish Women Immigrants in America 1880-1910, research for which took Ms. Kalinowsi frequently to libraries and historical societies in Boston and New York City. A travel grant from Hood helped foot bills for fuel and train tickets, and family in both cities provided a roof over her head.

Ms. Kalinowski learned that many Irish immigrants of the period came as single women, in search of “hope in this life rather than in death. America was that hope.” To coin the words of Irish bard Seamus Heaney in his poem The Cure of Troy, they came despite history’s admonishment not to “hope on this side of the grave” and with the belief that a “further shore” was reachable.

For many of these women, it was reachable, Ms. Kalinowski discovered. “They took jobs as domestic servants, where they observed middle-class life up close. They married later, and their children became nurses, doctors, teachers, policemen, firemen and office clerks—jobs that had cachet at the time.”

Ms. Kalinowsky graduated in September with an M.A. in Humanities, a degree that will enable her to advance in the library world. She is currently a substitute librarian for the Frederick County Public Libraries and hopes someday to write for Irish-American organizations and publications.